Where we left off

Summer solstice pictures from June. I pull them out to look at the green and purple every now and then. I love the Maxfield Parrish clouds, and remember how swirling still the longest day of the year sky seemed, light at nearly ten.

A month later and where have I been? Mostly perched in my office chair with pen in one hand, phone in the other - my battle implements against the economy and the inevitable slow down of a European July. 6:30 comes, and I stop typing long enough to make dinner and play with the children for a few hours, then they are in bed and I am back at my desk until midnight. And so it goes.

Ice Cool

Last week's high temperatures found Caroline splashing in our bathtub building waterfall towers and holding tea parties for plastic animals, or sitting in front of the fan humming songs into it. This week the weather cooled down to European summer celsius. But Caroline has kept on good terms with the fan, and added it to her prop box for odd projects.

Yesterday she turned on the fan and started to wrap its base with dish towels. Dish towels arranged decoratively on the floor seem oddly domestic but harmless, so I ignored her and kept working, stuck on mute in a conference call. She began to hum along with the fan. I kept working. Then she added a percussion line to her melody – the freezer door opening and shutting, on repeat. I got annoyed.

“Don’t worry Maminka*,” she said, “I’m finished, see!”

Arranged on the towels were six ice packs lined up in rows. She'd set the fan on high to blow over the blocks and onto C. “Look Mommie, It’s going to get cooler any minute!”

It was a play on a year ago - the last time we tried this trick.

Today I noticed in the news that big companies in New York City are also getting into the action – melting giant ice blocks to make AC, thus saving on electricity and going green.

Hey Caroline, we’re early adapters!

*Maminka - mother in Czech. Used by C strategically, especially when trying to get away with something.

Drums, horn, the opening bars to “Fanfare for the Common Man” sound. I stand at our bookshelves, and try to decide what to read to such music. I stand as straight as can be, and laugh when I find myself ready to put hand to heart. Then I remember - it is nearly July. Already, the Ambassador’s invitation to a July 4th reception hangs on our refrigerator, reminding me it is midsummer.

The music nudges memories of other 4ths too - watching fireworks over the Capitol from the banks of the Potomac; picnics on my grandparents’ farm surrounded by hundreds of relatives and family friends; a pig picking along the North Edisto, where food came second to the freedom of running wild with cousins, lighting sparklers, swinging from ropes into the cold black river; later, playing Barber and Copland to audiences melting in the heat of south Georgia, still gracious enough to thank us for the music.

Now, I’m always thankful it isn’t as hot here as it is in the South this time of year, but I miss the celebration. We celebrate the 4th mostly by explaining its significance to our friends. This 4th we’ll be in the middle of coming back from one trip before heading off to another one. We don’t have any plans (the Embassy party is this week to avoid the Czech holidays) but tonight as the music plays, I decide that I’ll celebrate by listening to all the Copland and Barber in my collection; I’ll gather up Gershwin and Charles Ives, John Cage and George Crumb, and hit play.

Summer Solstice

Rain has fallen all across middle Europe today, hiding the sun and the solstice. This afternoon I snapped a shot of our balcony before the sun could completely disappear. I've got strep throat, and couldn't celebrate the day as I might wish, but I did enjoy sitting on the step between our bedroom and balcony, waiting for the storm to break. It arrived in great claps of thunder, no lightning to be seen, and then a massive downpour.

Summer means travel

A few Fridays ago a very nice guy from Czech Radio interviewed me about living in Prague as an expat. Maybe it was the hiking map I’d just bought and the beautiful weather waiting just outside the café, maybe it seemed a safe angle to take, but my answers had a decided slant to them. You can judge for yourself:

Why did you move to the Czech Republic?
Because we wanted to travel more and knew we wouldn’t have time if we lived in the U.S.

What do you see is the difference between Czechs and Americans?
Czechs are more experienced travelers, at least in part because they have a great deal more vacation time than Americans!

What do you like to do on the weekends?
Travel around the countryside.

A tak dal.

By the end of the conversation, I’m pretty sure the interviewer had decided I was a travel nut and as granola-y as they come. He asked me if I’d ever consider moving outside the city to the country (since I apparently spend all my time there). Citified as I am, and never having been asked this particular question, I was caught off guard and vehemently said “no way!” My reasons were pretty weak and I believe I mentioned an overweening love of vegetable stores and potable coffee at least three times before I stopped burbling and changed the subject.

It was an interesting question though, and I whiled away some time on the subject while walking back to my office.

Why I prefer to live in a city:
1. I love to walk and get somewhere I need to go. I love that I can walk for kilometers around Prague and still be in an interesting area and not on a highway.
2. A house in the country requires a lot of work. I begrudge time spent changing light bulbs. At times I do wish I had that maintenance bone in my body, as I love visiting chatas and camping out in the country, but I just don't possess it.
3. I like living in a place with enough people for me to blend in with and be ignored on those days when I don't feel like chatting.
4. In a city there is always a new person to meet. (See, I’m not a misanthrope!)
5. Have I mentioned vegetables? There are four veggie shops within one block of our flat. They compete to see who has cilantro, even in the winter.
6. In a city, there is always something new to experience: a new restaurant, an exhibit, concerts, new playgrounds. This is also why I like to travel.
7. I like the idea that there is an English bookstore within a few blocks of our house, just in case.
8. And then, there is the coffee.

Ancient Egyptian a/c

Yesterday the sun baked our flat to its highest temperatures yet - something like 89F at 9 at night. This was a bit much even for our southern souls, and I decided to get creative with my cooling technique.

Inspired by a vague memory of a drawing of Egyptians fanning ice, I grabbed most of the ice packs from the freezer (we have an abundance, unused most of the year) and reverently placed them in front of our one fan. Then Caroline and I arranged ourselves Cleopatra style in front of the fan/ice setting, and waited. I took notes while Caroline tried to decide if it were possible to eat the ice packs, unstopper them or generally use them as weapons of chaos and destruction.

Once Caroline got tired of pretending to be Cleopatra, and the ice packs lost their icey edge and turned into wet packs we undid the arrangement and each tried our own technique.

Caroline draped a wet sheet around herself and refused to remove it.

I placed one last ice pack on my head and walked around quite elegantly and absurdly.

Will froze a beer to slush and drank it while lying on the floor and listening to music.

At midnight the flat had cooled down enough for me to get perky. So then I went to sleep.

* My notes: The air in front of the fan did get cooler as the ice in the packs started to melt (classic evaporative cooling). We decided it would have been even cooler if the packs were set in water - tonight’s experiment!

Last Night

The hottest I’ve spent in the Czech Republic. Without AC and with the fan in C’s room, we opened the door to the balcony wide and hoped for some breeze. Will finally fell asleep but it was still too hot for me, so I spent most of the night perched on a garden chair, out on the balcony, counting the lights around the courtyard and trying to guess which would be the last to turn off. It turned out to be the small string of fairy lights in the far corner of the courtyard, not the reddish lava lamp in the penthouse with the terrace (my guess).

It was very quiet, last night. Because of the unusual heat, most people escaped to the countryside early yesterday, and at least two of the buildings in our square were completely silent. One – directly behind us – is the local courthouse, so it empties at 4 on Fridays and doesn’t stir until 7 on Mondays. Another, just next door, is empty of tenants, waiting to be sold. Only one older man lives there, the caretaker. I met him once when I went on a tour of the building. He reeked of sour sweat and alcohol, and spent the hour slowly shaking out keys to fit each door while trying to stay upright - showing off the meticulous intensity of a drunk in the middle of the day. At night his light goes off early and he never opens his windows. I can only imagine how hot his rooms must be.

Towards 3 a thunderstorm blew through, but it was just a little guy that had darted ahead of the high pressure system moving in from Germany sometime today. Afterwards it felt even hotter and reminded me of hot nights in Charleston when sitting outside feels as if you are swimming (and breathing) in the lightest of warm waters. When you have air conditioning to return to, that swimming sensation can be a magical experience. When that's the only air you've got, it can feel a little suffocating. Once the last light switched off in our courtyard, I came in and stood in front of the ice box, sipping a cold glass of apple juice and inhaling the freezer air. It was 4:30, and time to sleep.

Filed under: Czech weather summer south

Yellow is not a color I put on normally (I was once described quite aptly as greenish yellow by an Italian friend of mine, and I get even more greenish when I add it externally). But to drive by fields full – canola flowers in May, sunflowers in July – makes me want to swallow whole the view, to get out of the car and lick up the colors with a paintbrush or a camera.

Caroline seems to feel the same way about grass. Whenever she sees lawn, she runs to it and flies in slow ellipses, arms flung wide and her smile dashing ahead. Tall grass turns her into a lion and she sits on her haunches, seed tips above her head, splendidly isolated by her nest of green. She so rarely sits quietly that I am always surprised by this transformation from swooping swift to still lion.

This weekend we drove to the mountains between Dresden and Prague and on the way I had my chance to drive through fields of sunflowers, and to see the hop vines that are nearly at their peak. Once arrived, Caroline ran amuck with her friend Viki, a nearly two herself who taught C how to hold a piece of grass to examine life in the wild, and how to stomp in mud puddles. Caroline obligingly demonstrated how to shake the fence in the children’s playground, and they took turns mimicking each other, fake coughing in echoes.

We took our time getting anywhere, with two twos, and the getting there was half the fun – parents chatting, children holding hands and careening about like taffy being pulled from one side of the path to another. Together they met multitudes of butterflies, a tiny frog and a slug that was slowly crossing the road. They hiked nearly to the top of a hill, and helped pick raspberries. Caroline lioned in the grass, and then the girls sat on a picnic blanket and lapped up yogurt and crackers and even some good for you cheese. They didn’t speak a language in common, but by the end of the trip they could say each other’s names and that was enough for them.